Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-ndw9j Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-09T16:49:01.665Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Rape in Public: Overlooking Child Sexual Assault in Charlotte Mary Yonge's The Daisy Chain

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 March 2022

Eileen Cleere Open the ORCID record for Eileen Cleere [Opens in a new window]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Charlotte Mary Yonge's Victorian novel The Daisy Chain (1856) is not a text that has been discussed in terms of sexual violence. A “family story” that apparently inspired Alcott's Little Women (1869), The Daisy Chain has been most often considered a novel about the conflict between female vocation and religious duty. However, in this essay I argue that The Daisy Chain is also a novel that grapples openly with the problem of child sexual assault and features violence against women and girls as an accepted custom of what Berlant and Warner call the “heterosexual life narrative” (“Sex in Public”). Our postmodern abstraction of rape and the terminology surrounding rape have made sexual assault harder to “see” in both reality and representation, but in the context of the #MeToo movement, this essay pushes for an understanding of rape in The Daisy Chain as an event that happens in plain sight. Toggling between the two meanings of the word “overlook,” I argue that rape is a normalized custom of heterosexual belonging that can only be seen in the novel by girls with bad vision. Ethel May's myopia allows her to see what the rest of her family overlooks: rape in public.

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 50 , Issue 1 , Spring 2022 , pp. 61 - 86
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Alcott, Louisa May. Little Women. 1869. New York: Norton, 2004.Google Scholar
Armstrong, Nancy. Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.Google Scholar
Berlant, Lauren, and Warner, Michael. “Sex in Public.” Critical Inquiry 42, no. 2 (1998): 547–66.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bourrier, Karen. “‘The Spirit of a Man and the Limbs of a Cripple’: Sentimentality, Disability, and Masculinity in Charlotte Yonge's The Heir of Redclyffe.” Victorian Review 35, no. 2 (2009): 117–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brown, Wendy. States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Budge, Gavin. “Realism and Typology in Charlotte Mary Yonge's The Heir of Redclyffe.” Victorian Literature and Culture 31, no. 1 (2003): 193–223.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dalley, Lana L., and Holzer, Kellie. “Victorian Literature in the Age of #MeToo: An Introduction.” Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies 16, no. 2 (2020): 1–18. http://ncgsjournal.com/issue162/introduction.html.Google Scholar
Ducharme, Jaime. “‘Indelible in the Hippocampus Is the Laughter’: The Science Behind Christine Blasey Ford's Testimony.” Time, September 27, 2018, https://time.com/5408567/christine-blasey-ford-science-of-memory.Google Scholar
Estes, Angela M., and Lant, Kathleen Margaret. “Dismembering the Text: The Horror of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women.” Children's Literature 17 (1989): 98–123. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/246185/pdf.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ferguson, Frances. “Rape and the Rise of the Novel.” Representations 20 (1987): 88–112.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Foucault, Michel. “Confinement, Psychiatry, Prison.” In Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1977–1984, edited by Kritzman, Lawrence D., 178–210. New York: Routledge, 1988.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction. 1978. Translated by Hurley, Robert. New York: Vintage, 1990.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. “Sexual Morality and the Law.” In Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1977–1984, edited by Kritzman, Lawrence D., 271–85. New York: Routledge, 1988.Google Scholar
Garber, Megan. “The Myth of the ‘Underage Woman.’” The Atlantic, August 15, 2019, www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2019/08/jeffrey-epstein-and-the-myth-of-the-underage-woman/596140.Google Scholar
Higgins, Lynn A., and Silver, Brenda R.. “Introduction.” In Rape and Representation, 1–11. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991.Google Scholar
Jackson, Louise. Child Sexual Abuse in Victorian England. New York: Routledge, 2000.Google Scholar
Kelly, Kate. “Back at Georgetown Prep, Brett Kavanaugh Is Hailed as a Hero,” October 28, 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/10/28/us/politics/kavanaugh-georgetown-prep.html.Google Scholar
Kincaid, James R. Child-Loving: The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture. New York: Routledge, 1992.Google Scholar
Lubey, Kathleen. “Sexual Remembrance in Clarissa.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 29, no. 2 (2016–17): 151–78. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/641783.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mardorossian, Carine M. Framing the Rape Victim: Gender and Agency Reconsidered. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2014. www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt6wq9w4.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Paglia, Camille. “Perspective Needed – Feminism's Lie: Denying Reality about Sexual Power and Rape.” Newsday, February 17, 1991, https://archive.seattletimes.com/archive/?date=19910217&slug=1266788.Google Scholar
Roiphe, Katie. The Morning After: Sex, Fear, and Feminism on Campus. New York: Little, Brown, 1993.Google Scholar
Rooney, Ellen. “Criticism and the Subject of Sexual Violence.” MLN 98, no. 5 (1983): 1269–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schaffer, Talia. Novel Craft: Victorian Domestic Handicraft and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schaub, Melissa. “‘Worthy Ambition’: Religion and Domesticity in The Daisy Chain.” Studies in the Novel 39, no. 1 (2007): 65–83. www.jstor.org/stable/29533800.Google Scholar
Spampinato, Erin A. “Reading Rape in the Critical Canon: Adjudicative Criticism and the Capacious Conception of Rape.” Forthcoming in Representations 32, no. 2 (2021).Google Scholar
Steedman, Carolyn. Strange Dislocations: Childhood and the Idea of Human Interiority. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995.Google Scholar
Thierauf, Doreen. “Daniel Deronda, Marital Rape and the End of Reproduction.” Victorian Review 43, no. 2 (2017): 247–69.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thorne-Murphy, Leslee. “The Charity Bazaar and Women's Professionalization in Charlotte Mary Yonge's The Daisy Chain.” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 47, no. 4 (2007): 881–99. www.jstor.org/stable/4625145.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tosh, John. “What Should Historians Do with Masculinity? Reflections on Nineteenth-Century Britain.” History Workshop 38 (1994): 179–202. www.jstor.org/stable/4289324.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wagner, Tamara. “Depressed Spirits and Failed Crisis Management: Charlotte Yonge's Sensationalisation of the Religious Family.” Victorians Institute Journal 36 (2008): 275–302.Google Scholar
Walkowitz, Judith R. City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wolf, Richard. “Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh gets hero's welcome from conservative Federalist Society.” USA Today, November 14, 2019, www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2019/11/14/brett-kavanaugh-supreme-court-justice-federalist-society/4195854002.Google Scholar
Yonge, Charlotte Mary. The Daisy Chain; or, Aspirations. 1856. Sandwich, Mass.: Beautiful Feet Books, 2004.Google Scholar
Yonge, Charlotte Mary. The Trial: More Links of the Daisy Chain. 1864. London: Macmillan, 1888.Google Scholar